Beautiful Vipers
by MELSBELLS
Summary: A serial killer - cum - terrorist returns to the United States. Silvo asks his Graceland agents to use their criminal connections to make her easier to track down. But that doesn't make it any easier to kill her.


**_Disclaimer/Author's Note_**: I own little more than Noelle Piper. Thank you ever so for reading!

* * *

"Beside her, her husband could only splutter, and he stopped even that when  
she half turned to flash him a smile - the instinctive, brilliant smile of a woman  
who knows what feeble creatures men can be. You couldn't learn to smile like  
that. It was something a woman either knew the minute she was born, or never  
knew at all."  
Cornell Woolrich - _I'm Dangerous Tonight_

It starts just after dawn.

Charlie is the only one awake to hear the click of the key in the lock, the door swinging open. She's half undressed, her heels left on the stairs and in the hallway outside of her room; she draws the strap of her dress up over her shoulder and leans out over the landing, peering down into the darkness.

"Charlie," Gerry Silvo's voice says, echoing in the open space. He sounds mildly surprised, but not unpleasantly so. "You're home."

"My connection passed out," she says over a sigh, collecting her shoes as she walks back down the steps; she's glad that she's already washed her face, rubbed the make up from her wrist. Fake or not, there's no need for the boss to see what a mess these long nights make her. "I wasn't getting any more information out of her tonight."

They don't have the same relationship that Silvo and Briggs have. Rather than being built on an easy rapport, Charlie depends on the fact that she's a goddamn _professional_ and good at her job to earn her points with Silvo - not that she does not like him, because he's a good boss, as far as bosses go. She takes no issue with him, and gives him no reason to do so with her.

_That _is how their relationship works. And she's never wanted anything different.

"Mind helping me get everyone up?" Silvo asks, tapping a file against his palm.

She's gone up and down enough steps tonight, but Charlie nods without too much annoyance, her messy hair falling into her face. But she is not putting the shoes back on - those get kicked under the coffee table. She'll deal with them tomorrow.

The boss takes Briggs, DJ, and Johnny. Charlie brushes Paige's hair away from her face and gently shakes her shoulder until she wakes up; for Mike, she flicks on the overhead and says, "Boss is here. Get your ass downstairs - speaking of, are those _duckies_?"

She gets a pillow thrown at her for her trouble, but it's worth it to see the way Levi's face goes pink, all the way to the tips of his ears.

They assemble in the kitchen. Briggs is taking deep, yoga breaths and Johnny is bleary eyed under his comforter; Mike isn't totally convinced that he isn't naked underneath, but Charlie puts together a pot of coffee, and before long, the scent of caffeine has everyone feeling a little more alert - like this isn't quite so terrible, being awake before the sun has even appeared over the Pacific.

Silvo allows them a minute to get settled, get a cup of coffee, really _wake up _before he sets the file down on the table. Bits of paper are sticking haphazardly out of the folder, and Mike's fingers itch to pat them into place. He wraps his hands tighter around his own cup of coffee and taps his foot on the rung of his stool.

"Whatever job you're working on, I want you to bench it. You two," he says, looking at Paige and DJ, "Included. I know I'm not, strictly speaking, your boss, but what I'm about to tell you spans agencies. You guys are some of the best of the best, and you've fostered relationships with the sort of people that might be able to help us. You need to pull whatever resources are still safe for you to use, alright?"

Mike feels himself leaning towards Silvo, drawn forward by the intensity in his voice. tipping forward on his seat. "Absolutely," he says earnestly. Perhaps too earnestly - Johnny snorts out a laugh and tugs Mike back with a hand on his shoulder.

But Silvo doesn't seem to notice. He's sorting through the file in his hand, flipping through pages of pages stamped CONFIDENTIAL and series of photocopied plane tickets and receipts. There's a map, crisscrossed with ink; there's a picture of a body tag, a picture of a crime scene, a picture of a gun left in the street with a yellow evidence marker next to it.

His hands still on what must be the photo he'd been looking for; he leaves it face down for the moment, and Charlie notices just how tired Silvo looks - he was woken in the middle of the night, too. She wants to tell him that there's coffee, but he's never asked to even enter Graceland before - she doesn't think she has to invite him to help himself to the caffeine, either.

"This is your new job. All of you." He flips the photo - a headshot - over, and the agents take in the glossy 8 x10.

A young woman stares back at them. Dark eyes, dark hair, and a pair of lips twitched into an almost shy smile. With her curls and dimples, she looks far more like the princess than she does the villain.

It's almost anticlimactic, Johnny thinks, until Mike pulls the photo towards him with the tips of his fingers and says, almost reverently:

"Noelle Piper."

Every head in the room swivels towards Mike. He flinches under the attention, but continues, "A friend from the Academy was obsessed with her. Well, with the myth of her. Sir."

"What do you mean, 'the myth'?" Johnny asks, tossing Mike's a bottle of water between his hands. "I thought our Briggsy was the only myth around these parts."

"It's just a theory," Mike says quickly, as if Briggs actually _needs _to be appeased; as if his ego is that fragile. Johnny shakes his head, biting back on a grin - it just doesn't seem _appropriate _for the situation at hand. It's just - it's hard to imagine Mike as an undercover agent when his face is so open and trusting, looking between them like he cares that they believe him. Like he thinks they think he's lying. He's _genuine_, and Johnny hopes that he'll keep a bit of that, even when he's been in the house as long as Briggs.

Mike pauses, thinking back to Oliver Astly. _Friend from the Academy _might have been Mike being a bit kind - not that Astly was an enemy, but he had certainly been unsettling. Prior to the Academy, Astly had majored in criminal psychology at Ithaca and had been looking to become an analyst at the Academy. He'd known a lot about the inner workings of criminals, and seemes especially interested in serial killers, and had always been happy to share over dinner or during their endurance runs or - well. Whenever he had an audience.

"Some people think that the name - Noelle Piper - might actually be the name of a terrorist organization. There is, or _was_, an actual Noelle Piper, of course - she grew up in the Irish mob in Boston, eventually beginning to kill for them. But it's extremely unlikely that she's been responsible for everything that has been attributed to the name over the past ten years." Mike continues.

A chip crunches loudly in Paige's mouth, and she looks around the kitchen without an ounce of self-consciousness. There, Johnny thinks, is someone who is comfortable in her own skin. So comfortable, in fact, that she's capable of shedding it and becoming someone else, knowing that her own skin will be waiting for her when she comes back.

And what a lovely skin it is.

"I knew you were sent here for a reason, Warren," Silvo says into the silence. Mike ducks his head. "That's right. Piper was raised to be a soldier, but, from what we can guess, she got bored. She is very much a real person, very much responsible for much of what she has been blamed for, and where she hasn't been directly responsible, people have been acting in her name. And according to this -" A pause to slide a glossy security photograph across the countertop. Gone are the days of the grainy black and white screencaptures; this is blurry, but Noelle's presence is unmistakable, impossible to miss. Front and center, dragging a small suitcase behind her. There's a flurry of activity around her, and it makes Mike's head hurt that someone so dangerous is moving among a largely unaware mass. "- she has just arrived in Los Angeles."

Voicing the house's thoughts at large, DJ asks, "How did that happen? How the hell did she even get back on the continent?"

"You're asking the wrong questions," Silvo says patiently. He takes a few more photos - some more grisly than others, colored black and white to protect the desk workers' delicate psyches - from the file and lines them up alongside the picture of their target. She's young - not much older than Mike, if that, and it's hard to imagine that she's _the _Noelle Piper.

DJ crosses his arms across his chest. Piper has been connected to more than one shipment of weapons to the United States. If this is leading up to an opportunity to rid his own career of the difficulty that she provides, he would rather Silvo simply say as much rather than playing a damn _guessing game_.

"Who's helping her?" Charlie suggests at the same time that Paige says:

"And why did she come back? Why now?"

Silvo nods approvingly at the both of them. "Better."

"Why was her photo taken? She's smarter than that. She's avoided some of the world's best agents and agencies. She's not about to let herself be photographed unless... what? Unless what?" DJ says, very nearly cutting Silvo off. He leans back against the counter opposite the island, careful not to topple the pile of dishes sitting in the sink. It's Briggs's turn to wash them, and he hasn't gotten the opportunity to beg off to Warren yet, so the dishes have gone undone.

Silvo points at DJ. "There you go, Jakes. Is she just getting sloppy? Losing her touch?"

"She's inviting us out to play," Briggs says.

Mike is dismayed to see that he looks almost _excited _at the prospect.

* * *

"She's just a girl," Paige says, the sand already warming beneath her palms. "She's just a little girl. Briggs could probably crush her between his fingers. Not that I'm underestimating her. Or sympathizing with her."

It makes Mike laugh uncomfortably.

They were still talking when the sun rose into the sky, when DJ helped himself to his morning glass of juice and Briggs began making pancakes for the house. Silvo excused himself, clapping each of his charges on the shoulder and telling them that he'd be in touch soon - sooner than if they'd been going on about their business as usual. And that was that - DJ began bickering with Johnny soon afterward, and Paige settled into toying with Briggs, playing a dangerous game that had the potential of ending with her not getting any pancakes. Mike began washing the dishes that were already in the sink in preparation for another day, and Briggs smiled to himself over the hot griddle. Johnny glared at Paige's laughing mouth - he officially owed her twenty dollars. They'd eaten and Briggs and Johnny had gone off to catch the morning's waves; DJ and Paige and Mike found a football and threw it around for a bit. Charlie _finally _crawled into bed at 9:34.

"How does a girl become -" Paige tosses a handful of sand into the wind. "-_that_."

"How does anyone become anything?" DJ asks, doing his best to shrug without sitting up.

Mike wonders if he can get in contact with Astly. He wonders if he _should_. Astly is the closest thing to an expert Mike can think of, and he's sure his friend has been clued in. Surely the FBI realized that he could help. Surely the FBI knows what it's doing - it's the least he can hope, but he has to hope for that much. Because he's stillnot completely sure what _he's _doing, and the thought that someone as unhinged as Noelle Piper _does _makes him feel even less grounded. Like he missed an important lesson at the Academy - what to do when instructed to find any clues to the location of a terrorist and, if possible, deliver her body to the Bureau.

"At this point, bringing her in alive doesn't seem to be an option," Silvo had said earlier that morning, looking grim. "She's unskilled in hand-to-hand combat, but getting close enough to engage her will be a problem. Try to stick to distance shots only - set up a sting, and then sniper her. One shot - that's all you'll get. Right here." He tapped himself between the eyes. "If she feels that you're trying to kill her, she'll disappear. Or worse."

"We don't even know if she's coming here," DJ says, stripping off his shirt and balling it under his head, a makeshift pillow. "They saw her in LA. We're just supposed to be aware."

"Come on," Mike says. "Silvo wouldn't have - he wouldn't have come over here to say that. I mean, maybe he didn't say it in so many words, but I think he expects us to go after her." Paige blinks at him curiously. DJ doesn't even bother opening his eyes. "They're not making PSAs, or anything. They would if they wanted the public to be aware, but they don't, which means - which means we have to get to her before she gets to anyone."

"You've got a real hero complex, you know that, Levi?" DJ asks. Paige laughs, at least managing to look a little apologetic as she does. "Let the Bureau do their thing." He finally cracks one eye open, squinting against the sun in Mike's direction. "Unless you don't think they're doing the right thing?"

"No," Mike says. He thinks about what Badillo said the first time they met. _You believe in the Bureau. _He'd agreed. He still does. "I think they're doing what, logistically, makes sense. We're capable agents relatively close to where a major threat was last spotted - we should know so we can be ready."

"You think that's how it works, Mikey?" DJ asks, pushing himself up on one elbow. "We see this girl, take her down?" He shakes his head. "Mike - this girl once killed a man abroad, sewed a crate of illegal ammunition inside of him, and had his corpse returned to the United States. But the crate didn't make it through customs because of the metal black box - the authorities ripped this guy open and - boom! She'd put a fucking bomb inside of him. She blew up the fucking plane, Mike. The black box, of course, was relatively unharmed. Until she told three different gangs that she'd done as much, and they raged _war _for this shit. Decimated the guy's entire family, looking for anyone who might have known what happened to it. Funeral directors, family, fucking airport janitors, man. She's _loco_, Levi. If we don't do this right, we're going to end up being bombs; if she so much as _feels _us on her, we'll be dead before we hit the floor. Not just one of us - no. She'll find our key, and try every house in the United States until she finds the one the one that it matches. And then she'll murder each and every one of us."

Mike shakes the imagery from his head, taking a handful of sand and letting it trickle back to the beach, and repeating. "And it's our job to protect people from her," Mike repeats, with a bit less conviction than he'd had before. He knows that Noelle Piper is certifiable. He _knows _that.

"Yes. But we let her come to us, okay?"

"Why don't we ask Briggs?" Paige says innocently, standing up on lean legs and putting two fingers in her mouth. An ear piercing whistle later, Briggs coasts into shore and jogs up the beach towards them. Mike stands up to meet him.

"You're wrecking a beautiful swell, Paige," Briggs warns, though there's no real heat behind it. "What's up?"

"Levi and DJ are having a lover's spat about Piper," Paige says, flopping back down in the sand. "Mike thinks we're supposed to look for her. DJ thinks we're only supposed to act if she comes to us. Settle it?" she asks sweetly.

Briggs squints out at the water for a long time, watching Johnny ride a few waves. When he finally answers, he has a smile on his face that Mike has learned to associate with questionable actions, and he knows what Briggs is going to say before he says it.

"I think we're gonna hunt this bitch down."


End file.
